IPods for learning?

According to canada.com Duke University is going to distribute over 1,000 IPods to the ipcoming frosh class as an experiment to see how well an infusion of this technology influences the students' experiences. Kind of sounds like an IPod-version of the famous ACOTT study, and I'm sure Apple was excited to comply. The students' IPods will have campus maps, orientation info, the school fight song, and (I'm sure) much more. This raises some questions:

1. What does Canada care about Duke anyway?
2. Do we really think students will use these for much more than listening to rap during Fine Arts 100?
3. How are they going to allow students to always have their IPods with them and keep them from being distracted?
4. Why not just give them PDAs instead?

And the most important question:
Why isn't my school giving out IPods? I want one!

Seriously, I am all for innovative uses of new technologies and looking for educational purposes for technologies that already exist. However, this seems to be a lot of research money down the drain. But who knows? Maybe I'll be surprised. At the least, it's an interesting project that I hope to hear more about after they have completed it.